


Classical Conditioning

by wisekrakens



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Thousand Deans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-06 22:48:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/741052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisekrakens/pseuds/wisekrakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Deans are wrong, at first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Classical Conditioning

The Deans are wrong, at first. The seventh has its nose broken in the wrong place. The twenty-fourth’s greeting smile doesn’t reach its eyes, or crinkle up around the corners of its face the way the real Dean’s does. The fifty-first has blue eyes, which startles Cas just enough that the death-blow twists into something shallower, more painful, if not any more survivable. Cas stands over that Dean and blinks into its blue eyes as they panic, and then tighten, and then glaze over.

The blood is the right color, though.

The part of Cas that remains his own gladly, almost contemptuously, seizes on the mistakes. They make fooling Naomi so much easier: if Cas can focus on the wrongness of the Deans, instead of how their voices always tremble on the last word before Cas attacks, and how their shoulders always collapse inwards to shield their owner from pain already struck home, then Cas can keep himself separate from the instincts being slowly trained into him. That safe part of Cas sings with a viciousness that the real Dean has never seen, will never see, when Naomi praises the latest kill. It doesn’t matter that the viciousness is all Cas can cling to, so long as he can cling to it. He can climb back out of it, once he’s free. It’s not like he hasn’t done it before.

The two hundred and fourth Dean comes walking through the door like the fifty before it. Cas goes for its heart with barely a thought, following a pattern established around number one-seventy-five as Naomi began pushing Cas to get his kill time down.

Cas’s angel blade slides true – say what you want about Cas’s wavering loyalties, but he’s never missed a target at which he’s been aiming – and he steps back, tugging the thing free, as the Dean gurgles low in its throat. He turns, pacing around the Dean as it chokes on its own blood, searching for the wrongness. Too short, or too tall; too many freckles, too cross-eyed… Too bow-legged, maybe; that’d been the province of One-Thirteen, and it’d waddled more than walked. Cas had smiled, briefly, to imagine Dean’s reaction if he’d met such a poor copy of himself, before stabbing it through the neck.

But Cas can’t find the flaw in two-oh-four. He’s still looking, his eyes as wide as he dares let them go with panic, long after Dean lets out his death rattle – _Cas_ – and his green eyes glaze over and blood begins to crust around the toes of Cas’s shoes.

Cas’s vicious pride shatters into grief. He falls to his knees in the puddle of blood. 

Naomi doesn’t quite smile, back in her shadowed corner of the warehouse, but she nods. Progress.


End file.
